The communication systems for the electric power grids in North America were developed in response to the 1965 North-Eastern US blackout. Today's Supervisory Control and Data Access systems, which form the core of the communication system for monitoring and controlling the wide-area power grid, are based on the requirements and technology of that time period. However, in recent years, the data collection capabilities of different power grid monitoring systems, such as the Energy Management Systems' computing capacity in control centers have grown enormously.
Advances have been made to improve data exchange and availability of data by improving the communications infrastructure. However, with the continued expansion and variety of applications that are utilizing the data, greater flexibility in data delivery and reliability is needed. Systems today publish data at a fixed data rate and subscribers all receive the data at the published rate. If data packets are not received, they are treated as missed packets. Because of this structure, there is no way to efficiently manage and adapt data delivery to account for changing conditions. If the rate of data delivery is reduced, or packets are missed, many of today's systems and monitoring applications may become unreliable or disrupted due to the missing data.
While implementations are described herein by way of example, those skilled in the art will recognize that the implementations are not limited to the examples or drawings described. It should be understood that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit implementations to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.